Title: Integration of digital certificates and blockchain timestamping to provide a digital notarisation service

Authors: Elton Eiji Sasaki; Egon Walter Wildauer

Addresses: Department of Information Management, Universidade Federal do Paraná, Curitiba, PR, Brazil ' Department of Information Management, Universidade Federal do Paraná, Curitiba, PR, Brazil

Abstract: This paper aims to integrate digital certificates and blockchain technologies to cut red tape by developing an Android app that notarises digital documents. It is intended to solve the problem of increased demand to digitalise the Brazilian notarial system since internet access through smartphones has become ubiquitous in Brazil. Digital certificates provide a centralised know your customer (KYC) service through verification of a user's identity and proof of address, before issuing a digital certificate to a user. And blockchain provides a decentralised document timestamping service. Integration of digital certificates and blockchain assures authenticity of documents both in terms of identity through digital certificates and data integrity through blockchain timestamping.

Keywords: blockchain; bitcoin; Brazilian public key infrastructure; ICP-Brasil; digital certificates; digital signatures; digital notarisation; blockchain timestamping.

DOI: 10.1504/IJBC.2021.118132

International Journal of Blockchains and Cryptocurrencies, 2021 Vol.2 No.2, pp.121 - 142

Received: 10 Sep 2020
Accepted: 31 Mar 2021
Published online: 12 Oct 2021 *

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